If you like Wikipedia spirals, Hollywood starlets, and “fluorescent butts of night’s cigarette”
Dark Sparkler by Amber Tamblyn
VIOLETS’ PICKS 018
Where I found it
I know it’s not quite summer yet but it kind of feels like it in my part of the world. Thanks, global warming? It may just be a full four-month affair, full of light-streamed dawns and dusks on the patio, cat in camp chair. I’ve been thinking about what it means to live a dream life, like actually to be living it separate of being sold the commercial idea of a dream life. Happily, I discovered fairly recently that if I have books, good weather, and a pocket of time, that might just take me 99% there. The remaining 1%? Well, isn’t that life’s great mystery. A mystery that poetry seems, oddly enough, most equipped to solved.
One of my favorite summer movies as a teenager was The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, based on one of my favorite books as a teenager, a coming of age tale set during summer between four best friends who are different shapes and sizes but all seem to fit a pair of magical jeans. If you haven’t read or watched it, it’s not a fantasy tale. The jeans aren’t wand-waving, spell-casting magical. They’re just, I think, a really good versatile pair of worn-in jeans.
Anyway, there’s a character in this movie called Tibby. Tibby was played by an actress named
. I didn’t know Amber Tamblyn was a poet. But since I’ve been on Substack, the online water cooler for writers and readers today, I’ve discovered more and more people actually writing, not “blogging” or optimizing words, which is just so cool to me because I don’t think there’s been quite a place like this on the internet, with such diversity in voice and status, where calibre lives right next to the writer next door. So I’ve gotten into a habit now of, when I want to read something new and interesting, to browse Substack, which is how I found —and then her extensive body of writing, from essays to a thriller novel to poetry.A quick google tells me this poetry collection was all over the news in 2015. What was I doing in 2015? Having a Millennial crisis, mostly doing whatever the opposite of indulgence is—me, an introvert working at a call centre—and certainly not reading poetry.
First impressions
I love, love, love, concept poetry. If that term is vague, what I really mean is I love a curated theme. In the case of poetry: a collection of poems that isn’t forced together as one person’s thrown together anthologized experience of their life (which I do enjoy as well) but poetry intentionally designed to be part of a singular idea. A “story”, if you will. Not necessarily a narrative once-upon-a-time-to-happily-ever-after story like in the movies, but a story as a collection of fragments that together say something, make a statement, act as ode to a specific enthusiasm (or morbid fascination).
What’s this one about? It’s an ode to Hollywood starlets who died young—all except one, and I won’t spoil who it is, but eight years after this book was published, she’s well and making movies again.
Hollywood, poetry, cinematic horror. Where does beautiful end and ghastly begin? Speaking of beauty, this book is one. And ghastly? It’s that, too. A quick flip reveals a selection of artwork, but not enough so that it’s distracting. And the pages are printed in colour. Picking it up feels viscerally significant.
Of note: While many actors write poetry (Pamela Anderson, Kristin Stewart, Viggo Mortensen), Amber is the only one endorsed by Quentin Tarantino.
They said it
“The poetry collection examines the cost of fame through the lives of some of Hollywood’s most infamous and/or tragically infamous women in accessibly insightful, and deeply moving, lyrical form.”
—From Marie Claire
Lines to remember
I fear I’ll go down there too, identifying with the abyss. Washed up. Banging on the back door of a black hole. […] My hands are not my hands. They are the water surrounded by swirling, singing, overflowing stars. —From “Thelma Todd”
And the beginning of Technicolor meant the end of but blood dried on the hospital sheets will always be —From “Jean Harlow”
Seems like everyone’s having paradise for lunch but me. I am no glowing globe of shaken gold. No leggy Cindy. Kardashian’t. —From “Elizabeth Pine”
You might like this if…
You could never get over Brittany Murphy’s death, and maybe have a morbid fascination with true crime or the dark side of Hollywood (maybe even both). You are an actor or really, any creative person. You also loved Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, and maybe the character you related to the most was, in fact, Tibby the rebel. Or maybe you were Carmen, the drama queen. Or Lena, the artist. Or Bridget, the athlete. You totally get the irony that is labelling these characters as one-dimensional when one word come not nearly come close to depicting the interior lives that were so well-depicted both in literature and on screen. A few words can’t tell an entire story—but you’re willing to try to see if it can through a series of poems equal parts drama and truth and darkness and gut-wrenching twists sure to set you on a Wikipedia spiral to visit the ghosts of actresses past to find answers to “what happened to her?”.
This was the colour of…
The golden glow and lure of Hollywood and its disproportionate representation of peroxide blondes, giving way to the bright flushed pink of fresh-faced, starry-eyed ingenue and then the settling of ruminating, brewing rouge before it turns dark: blues and purples of bruises left from picking at everything that could’ve been, and reality hitting where fantasy left marks.
Details
Year: 2015
Author: Amber Tamblyn, whose most recent release is a book of essays on reconnecting to intuition, also called Listening in the Dark
Location: Santa Monica → Brooklyn
Publisher: Harper Perennial
This week’s find-the-poem game
How to play: Unscramble the excerpt from one of Amber Tamblyn’s poems below and see if you can find the full poem somewhere on the www. We’ll reveal the poem next Sunday.
nnCeotu su, ot eth hercyr ssolmsbo gnidnats dragu ni lluf bhlsu elihw scop mlobo sbonirb fo wolley epat ta rieht setag.
Did you guess it? Last week’s featured poem was “Flashlight” by James Pollock, published at Geist. Click to read the full poem.
You’re reading Violets’ Picks, where every Sunday I take you through an adventure brought to you by a poetry collection. Here’s some other Violets’ Picks this month you may have missed:
